The Tony Award nominations will be announced May 9th (changed from May 3rd), as the eligibility cut off has been changed to May 4th (it was April 28th) to give the nominators the chance to see all the eligible shows, many of which had to cancel performances because of COVID.
See updated New York Theater Awards 2022: Guide and Calendar
The 2022 Drama League Awards nominees will be announced at 11 a.m. this morning André De Shields and Denée Benton
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
The four shows that opened on Broadway this past week are all new versions of previously produced shows, two traditional Broadway revivals, two not as traditional. It was interesting to see how much of my reaction was affected by the previous productions, and wondered how other theatergoers approach revivals.
Funny Girl
Does Beanie Feldstein, cast in the Streisand role, make us forget Streisand, or at least make the show indelibly her own? Failing that, does the production have enough going for it so that the central performance doesn’t matter as much?
The answer to both questions is, ultimately, no.
Don’t misunderstand: There are rewards to be found in this entertainment….The charms of this revival, however, are just not rewarding enough to meet the expectations created for the show by Barbra Streisand more than half a century ago.
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf
a glamorous and, in one way, newly inventive production….the seven ladies, each dressed in a different color of the rainbow, dance exuberantly and delight in the longer narrative poems involving youthful reminiscence….some of the poems of pain and shame and anger…feel less in sync with the tone of the production, and also less in line with the current times.
How I Learned to Drive
…what’s remarkable about Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize winning play is precisely that the craftsmanship and especially the empathy draw us in, creating a theatrical filter that allows us to take in this disturbing story [about child abuse]..Mary-Louise Parker’s reprised performance does the heavy lifting in a play that is rightly, and smartly, a memory play told from the woman’s point of view. But it is the male character that offers the greater challenge. The playwright does what she can to establish Peck as a human being rather than a monster, but it is David Morse’s memorable performance that makes the character credible.
Hangmen
In Martin McDonagh’s black comedy about an ex-executioner, there’s craftsmanship in the way the playwright is able to maintain suspense in a plot full of surprises. There’s also cleverness in the dialogue, and in the wacky characters… But this time around, I found “Hangmen” ultimately less than satisfying….difficulty in making out some of the dialogue through the thick English accents…disappointing holes in the plot…changes in the cast…a gleeful reliance on violence bordering on the sadistic.
The Week in New York Theater News
“Harmony,” the Barry Manilow musical 25 years in the making, has been extended a week to May 15.
Jersey Boys will end its Off-Broadway run on May 22. It had resumed performances in November of 2021.
“Some Like It Hot” is coming to Broadway. The musical is adapted from the 1959 film with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, with music Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and a book by Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin. It is scheduled to open at Broadway’s Shubert Theater December 11, 2022, starring Christian Borle as Joe/Josephine , J Harrison Ghee as Jerry/Daphne, Adrianna Hicks as Sugar.
This is the third Broadway musical in recent years adapted from a movie about men who put on dresses to perpetuate some kind of scam (as Princeton Professor Brian Herrera described them succinctly for me.) The others are Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire
Exciting news: Anna Deavere Smith is working on a play about Billie Jean King called “Love All” (perfect title.) There will be a reading of it at New York Stage and Film at Vassar College in August.
Dave Malloy is suing the producer of his show Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, for failing to pay royalties
“The Gilded Age” is adding two more Tony winners to its cast for Season 2: Laura Benanti and Robert Sean Leonard. They join Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Audra McDonald, Nathan Lane, Michael Cerveris, Katie Finneran, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Debra Monk, Donna Murphy and Kelli O’Hara in the HBO Max series that is set in 19th century New York City.
Super Secret Arts in Gowanus is trying to be the Netflix for Live performance. “You pay $25 a month and you can come whenever you want for free,” co-founder Toby Singer told Gothamist
A new exhibition, You’ll Be Swell! You’ll Be Great! The Fine Art of Performance, will be presented by Helicline Fine Art May 2-August 31. Nearly three dozen works of art will be on display, depicting theatre, film, dance, music, and the circus. Pictured above, clockwise from left: “Day and Night” by Boris Aaronson, 1920: This was the last play Aaronson designed for the Yiddish Theatre; Costume drawing by Miles White from the 1957 Lena Horne Broadway musical, “Jamaica”; Jo Mielziner‘s preliminary sketch for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” 1955; Times Square by Philip Goodwin, 1937.
The Limits of Lived Experience by new New York Times columnist Pamela Paul
“Taken to its logical conclusion, the belief that “lived experience” trumps all other considerations would lead to a world in which we would create stories only about people like ourselves, in stories to be illustrated by people who looked like ourselves, to be reviewed and read only by people who resembled ourselves. If we all wrote only from our personal experience, our films, performances and literature would be reduced to memoir and transcription. What an impoverished culture that would be.”
Rest in Peace
Robert Morse, 90, eight-time Broadway veteran best known for his Tony-winning performance as the cheeky climber in “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” a role he recreated in the movie adaptation. He became familiar to a later generation in the role of Bertram Cooper, the senior partner in the advertising firm in the popular TV series “Mad Men.”
Barbara Maier Gustern, 87. She Taught New York To Sing
A lovely story about this vocal coach, who was killed last month in a senseless attack, which is part obituary, part what she meant to her students, which included Debbie Harry, Taylor Mac, and the entire cast of “Oklahoma”) and part glimpse into her teaching method. ““Throw the note over your shoulder!” was one of her catchphrases. Ms. Gustern used bits of Indiana argot to make a point. Rather than telling students to project their voices, she would say, “Sing it to the back 40!” City metaphors crept in, too: “Your mouth is a taxi cab,” she would say, “and your molars are the back doors of the taxi cab. And they’re opening, both of them.”
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A poem by Raul Cordero, placed inside a leaf-encrusted pavilion in the midst of all the superheroes on Father Duffy Square in the theater district: “ calm silence rolls /deftly through so much clamor/ roar echo unBarbara Maier Gusternheard”
